White nonsense

Does that title sound racist to you?

There have been some fun reminders of how racism works. Well, there are always lots of reminders, but there have been more food-based ones. That means we are going to talk about delicious foods, all based in Asia and shockingly different from each other.

It started with a white woman taking over congee (rice porridge), which she discovered was great for her digestion. She created recipes that would appeal to white palates and christened herself the congee queen.

(I am not going to link to her or the dumpling woman, but you could find them if you were sufficiently motivated.)

There were discussions about that and the appropriation, and lots of defenses of the woman; after all, it meant she appreciated the food. I am sure all of the other white people she hired (there was a team picture) had also become big fans of congee.

The problem is that she is profiting off of anti-Asian prejudice, where there is an expectation that if the food is made by Asian people it should be cheap, and it might be kind of low-class until a white person elevates it and jacks up the price. The "queen" did not create that situation, but she is upholding the system and profiting off of it. 

There would have been opportunities to promote already existing business or cookbooks. That could have skipped the "elevating" part, where she took these weird foods and made them okay. It would mean the loss of her crown, though, and don't white people have the right to be wonderful and profit off of brown people?

That leads to our next white woman, who had fond childhood memories of this weird Asian market with all of the strange smells and exotic ingredients. She mastered it and had a dumpling and noodle cookbook. 

There was a tweet asking -- generally, not to her -- what the deal was with that. Fumpling queen passive aggressively said she was not trying to be defensive, and she showed some understanding of internet harassment, but then defensively sent internet harassment at the tweeter. That was completely fair because that person had more followers. It wasn't a big enough difference to count, and certainly not with the extra permission people feel to attack women of color, but I had to feel that maybe she hadn't tried hard enough to not be defensive.

This seems like a good time to point out that when you feel affection for a food, there may still be racism tied up in how you perceive that food. This is also true for people. You may love a person, and that does not feel like how you think racism goes. However, when when you are still surprised when they do not conform to stereotypes, that is racism, which is about structure, not feelings.

I could also write about how whiteness is seen as deserving of defense and protection, and maybe mention something about bari-weiss-amy-cooper, but we are on a food theme now, so I am going to go here instead:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/24/media/gene-weingarten-indian-food-apology/index.html 

The point I want to make is just what a privilege it is to be able to post something petulant, ignorant, and not serious and get paid for that. There are literally thousands of people who say much more pertinent, intelligent things, and instead of getting paid they get abused by people who believe reverse racism is a thing.

It stuck out to me more because a friend had just tweeted about cooking versus restaurant food, and usually she can do better except for Thai and Indian. I had replied that Indian was the one I have decided to let restaurants make for me. That isn't even so much for being labor-intensive or difficult, but just because there are so many different ingredients required, and keeping them on hand versus how often I would cook... yep, just one spice. You nailed it, white guy I had not previously heard of!

Black children are frequently told that they need to work twice as hard to get half as far.

White men, on the other hand... first a stupid column, a digging in harder defense of the column, but a correction from the paper, and finally kind of a mea culpa, but still not sorry and not going to be a better person.

All paid.

That is structural, and it is privilege.

 

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/01/asian-food.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2015/01/baby-corn.html